"The superior man is catholic and no partizan. The mean man is a partizan and not catholic." (君子周而不比、小人比而不周。) ─ Confucius, The Analects, 2.XIV, translation by James Legge.

Saturday, October 31, 2009

Smart Liberals, Dumb Conservatives

Jason Richwine debunks the tired meme and reminds us that "people who subscribe to non-traditional ideas probably have above-average intellects, but that does not mean other smart people will like those ideas, ... a point often lost on liberals who work in universities or in the news media" — Are Liberals Smarter Than Conservatives?

Of course, "liberal thought" has become as boring and conformist as "conservative thought" in America, as Stuff White People Like shows. Perhaps the really smart people are the Paleoconservatives and Paleolibertarians, "who subscribe to non-traditional ideas" by embracing forgotten political traditions.

I'm also willing to concede that the average atheist might be smarter than the average religious believer, but the really smart people might be the religious traditionalists, who, like the abovementioned paleos, also "subscribe to non-traditional ideas," in their case vis-à-vis modernity itself. Said G. K. Chesterton, "The Catholic Church is the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age."

1 Comments:

Bird of Paradise said...

Stupid pathetic liberals think that all life on earth came crawling out of the sea as some silly fish that looks so dumb the other fish luagh at them and they tell us that all humans are decendent from apes and they have stupid dumper stickers reading THE EARTH IN YOUR MOTHER becuase their brains are pea sized perhaps smaller